Feature Request: Self-imposed Time Restrictions

Hacker News has a fea­ture called “no­pro­crast”. Here’s how they ex­plain it in the FAQ:

In my pro­file, what is no­pro­crast?

It’s a way to help you pre­vent your­self from spend­ing too much time on HN. If you turn it on you’ll only be al­lowed to visit the site for maxvisit min­utes at a time, with gaps of mi­naway min­utes in be­tween. The de­faults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 min­utes at a time, and then not al­low you back in for 3 hours.

If you try to use HN when you pre­com­mit­ted to not us­ing it, you’ll get the fol­low­ing mes­sage from them:

Get back to work!

Sorry, you can’t see this page. Based on the anti-pro­cras­ti­na­tion pa­ram­e­ters you set in your pro­file, you’ll be able to use the site again in 43 min­utes.

I was think­ing that some­thing like this would be awe­some for LessWrong. Per­son­ally, I have a rather large prob­lem brows­ing the web—which in­cludes brows­ing LessWrong—when I should be do­ing other things. After read­ing Digi­tal Min­i­mal­ism, I get the im­pres­sion that such strug­gles are moreso the norm than the ex­cep­tion.

Leech­block is ex­cel­lent. I presently use it to block face­book (ex­cept for events and perma­l­inks to spe­cific posts) all the time ex­cept for 10min be­tween 10pm and mid­night; I have a list of we­b­comics that I can only view on sat­ur­days; there is a web-based game that I can play once ev­ery sat­ur­day (where­after the ex­pired time pre­vents me from play­ing a sec­ond game), etc.

We (the LW team) are definitely think­ing about this is­sue, and I at least strongly pre­fer that peo­ple use the site in ways that re­flect de­ci­sions which they would en­dorse in ret­ro­spect; ie, read­ing things that are valuable to them, at times and in quan­tities that make sense, and not as a way to avoid other things that might be more im­por­tant. I’m par­tic­u­larly think­ing about this in the con­text of the up­com­ing Recom­men­da­tions sys­tem, which recom­mends older con­tent; that has the po­ten­tial to be more of an un­limited time sink, in con­trast to read­ing re­cent posts (which are limited in num­ber) or read­ing se­quences (which is more like read­ing a book, which peo­ple have ex­ist­ing adap­ta­tions around).

A big prob­lem with naively im­ple­mented no­pro­crast/​leech­block-style fea­tures at the site level, is that they can back­fire by shunt­ing peo­ple into workarounds which make things worse. For ex­am­ple, if some­one is pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on their com­puter, no­pro­crast kick­ing in when they don’t want to stop might make them start read­ing on their phone, cre­at­ing bad habits around phone use. Cut­ting off ac­cess in the mid­dle of read­ing a post (as op­posed to be­tween posts) is es­pe­cially likely to do this; but en­forc­ing a re­stric­tion only at load-time en­courages open­ing lots of tabs, which is bad. And since peo­ple are likely to in­vest in set­ting per­sonal rules around what­ever mechanisms we build, there are switch­ing cost if the first mechanism isn’t quite right.

So: I definitely want us to have some­thing in this space, and for it to be good. But it may take awhile.

Some fur­ther thoughts: I think there are some ar­eas where it makes sense for the LessWrong site to make proac­tive efforts. (I par­tic­u­larly raised con­cerns about the up­com­ing Recom­men­da­tions sec­tion feel­ing a bit time-sinky)

But I also think, for fea­tures like the one de­scribed in the OP, it usu­ally makes sense to solve that at a higher level up than “site-spe­cific.” i.e. if LessWrong lets you limit your time, but Face­book doesn’t, you just end up us­ing Face­book in­stead of LessWrong. If you want to limit time on LW it makes more sense to use tools like Free­dom or SelfCon­trol.

The place where it makes sense to me for the LW team to work on fea­tures like this would be “ar­eas that re­quire higher gran­u­lar­ity”, where you don’t nec­es­sar­ily want to block all of LessWrong (be­cause Free­dom does a bet­ter job), but you do want to block or add triv­ial in­con­ve­niences to parts of LW that are par­tic­u­larly dis­tract­ing (which Free­dom can’t do)

Since this seems to be an akra­sia/​ex­ec­u­tive-re­lated prob­lem, I sus­pect just hav­ing links to pos­si­ble ad­dons to use (and ideally, ex­am­ple con­figu­ra­tions) eas­ily ac­cessible could be dis­pro­por­tionately ame­lio­ra­tive com­pared to its im­ple­men­ta­tion cost, both via the re­minder that com­pul­sive brows­ing and miti­ga­tions for it both ex­ist, and via the so­cial sig­nal­ing that this is an ap­proved way of brows­ing that won’t make you weird. Though I’m not sure about the pos­si­ble noise it cre­ates, de­pend­ing on what easy op­tions you have for place­ment/​hid­ing.